


Love is Blind

by Artemis (Citrine)



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV)
Genre: M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 08:41:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Artemis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes & Watson from Mrs Hudson's pov and a glimpse of my version of her past history.</p>
<p>I heard them come in a little after midnight. I heard them laughing and it wasn’t that brittle laugh Mr Holmes has when he’s been injecting heaven knows what. It was genuine and full of warmth. They were laughing because they were happy and the next morning Dr Watson’s bed hadn’t been slept in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love is Blind

Love is blind. “Sometimes I think that it’s deaf, dumb and silly as well,” my old ma used to say. For her love meant fourteen children in nineteen years and never enough money to feed those of us who survived infancy.

Love is blind, but I’m not deaf.

I heard them come in a little after midnight. I heard them laughing and it wasn’t that brittle laugh Mr Holmes has when he’s been injecting heaven knows what. It was genuine and full of warmth. They were laughing because they were happy and the next morning Dr Watson’s bed hadn’t been slept in.

Oh, he had tried to make it look as if it had, rumpling up the pillows and the sheets, but I was a maid in a coaching inn before either of them was born and I’ve seen too many beds, slept in and not slept in, to be fooled. I straightened the bed up and tidied the room just as I always do and then I went downstairs to get their breakfast without saying a word to either of them.

It’s been the same story every night since, except for when they’ve had a falling out, a lover’s tiff, and then the doctor stamps off upstairs to his own bedroom.  Mostly they sleep together in Mr Holmes' room, in his narrow bed. They must have to squeeze together like two peas in a pod, half on top of one another to fit, but maybe they like that. There was a definite loud thump on the ceiling one night though, just like someone falling out of bed, and then a muffled curse. Needless to say I pretended that I hadn’t heard anything. I’m good at pretending.

They must think that I’m deaf. Perhaps I shall start saying ‘what’ and ‘excuse me’ when they speak to me or I could even buy an ear trumpet. Every day when I go up with breakfast Dr Watson comes directly to the table and Mr Holmes paces about while I set out plates and pour tea. He only ever sits down opposite the doctor when I’m ready to leave them to their meal. I go back downstairs into my kitchen and shut the door. I wait a couple of seconds and there it is, the unmistakeable scrape of chairs being moved together. Last week on my way back from the shops I stood on the pavement in Baker Street and looked up at the windows, they’ve moved the dining table, just a few inches, so that they can’t be seen from the street.

I don’t suppose that it’s occurred to either of them that I might notice. I’m a respectable, elderly woman and they probably assume that I’m too naïve to know that such passions can even exist between men.  If they think about me at all, which I’m sure that they don’t, they think that I’m a dried up old virgin, that I know nothing of desire. It’s true that I’ve never been married, Mrs is a cursory title given to cooks and housekeepers of a certain age, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve never had a man.

Those boys didn’t grow up in the world that I grew up in, the world before the steam engine and the telephone, where the wounded soldiers crawled back from the Napoleonic wars to beg and die in the gutter.  They used to hang men for doing what Mr Holmes and the doctor do in that narrow bed and the hangings were public.  Da used to lift me up on his shoulders to see the murderers, footpads and sodomites kick and struggle on the end of a rope.  

Up, up, up to Newgate, was I sorry, was I scared? No, not me.  It was a day out, a pie from the pieman, a swig of da’s gin and him in a good mood for once. He used to say that I was a little madam and maybe I was, but it was a harder, crueller world then. Ma sent me out to work at when I was seven, ten hours a day in a blacking factory.  I never even learned my letters until a clergyman I knew taught me to read and write, all curled up and cosy in his bed.

It was a nice, wide feather bed under the eaves, the finest bed I ever slept in. It would suit those two upstairs and it would save me some work as well. Every Monday, freezing in winter, sweating in summer I stand in front of that blasted copper for hours boiling and starching sheets that don’t even need to be washed because they haven’t been slept in. Then I have to trundle up and down making two beds where one would do.  I don’t know why they can’t just both move into Mr Holmes’ room and be done with it.

Yes, I do.

They don’t hang sodomites anymore, but they still send them to prison.  Even though we’re all civilised and respectable they still punish men for acting upon the nature that god gave them.  That’s why I act deaf, act blind and go on making beds that don’t need to be made.  If they fall then I’ll fall with them.  Who would want to rent rooms in a house of scandal and sin?  No one. And that rent money is all that stands between me and destitution.  I couldn’t afford the upkeep of this house or the tradesman’s bills without it.

My ma died in the workhouse. I don’t intend to end up the same way, which is why I won’t be the one to put the rope around their necks. A metaphorical rope, a metaphorical death, the danse macabre writ large across the pages of Reynolds Newspaper.  It’s cold in here tonight, there’s a shivering creep of chill in my bones.  Even if I close my eyes, even if I am dumb and deaf to everything, it may still all come shattering down. It isn’t that they aren’t discreet because they are, very much so, but love is blind, blind to everything that betrays it.

I imagine their stricken faces if the worse were to befall them and I know that I don’t want to see them broken on the wheel of respectability.  I could not bear to see them face the cold cruelty of the courtroom or the vicious glee of the press, with all the intimate details of their lives laid bare like carrion on a gibbet.

Even my shawl is cold on my shoulders, touched by the ice in the air. I should not have let the fire fall to smoke and embers while I sat and mused upon ruination. It has set my eyes to weeping. 

I must be getting soft in my old age.

 


End file.
